


Reasons Why

by Toxic_Waste



Series: Ripples [8]
Category: Phineas and Ferb, Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension (2011)
Genre: Across the 2nd Dimension, Ambiguously Shippy, But it can also be platonic if you want to interpret it that way, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, One Shot, Phindace, Post Movie, Post-Canon, Post-Movie(s), Sibling Incest, Works perfectly well either way, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 17:32:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15514959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: Motivation can be a funny thing sometimes, but behind every action or emotion, there's always some to be found, no matter how elusive it seems at first glance.





	Reasons Why

For Candace, loving her brother had never been a question, nor even an option. It was more than that – it was her duty, an integral part of being that powered her to get up the mornings, that pushed her through countless horrors, and that kept said horror buried far beneath the surface of her mind, where, though they would yet seep into her dreams, could never interfere with her decision-making process.

Phineas was everything – and he was everything she was _not_. He was weak, and pale, and bubbly. He was full of smiles and good cheer, even in the grimmest and darkest of times – his soul was snowy-white with childlike innocence that permeated the very fiber of his being so thoroughly that Candace could almost feel herself beginning to smolder in his presence. He was carefree and enthusiastic, oblivious, sometimes thoughtless – he crept up to her on the occasional nights when she was at the bunker, or during her other scattered bits of downtime, and would lift her arm and slide beneath it, and snuggle up to her, often putting his arms around her.

He would put his head on her chest and say that he was listening to her heartbeat, he would stare at her with those wide eyes that had seen so _little_ of what the world truly had to offer, and ramble for hours about subjects that Candace frankly cared only about inasmuch as _he_ cared about them – and told her about them.

The world they lived in was dark and grim, full of pain and suffering and loss. Candace had grown up knowing these things intimately – hunger and thirst, cold, deaths, pain of the worst variety. And above all, _fear_. Fear that, despite everything she did, everything she endured and no matter how far she pushed herself to achieve, she would still not quite make it – that something would happen.

That something would happen, and that her innocent bundle of hugs and hope and joy would be tainted, damaged, or taken from her. She’d built her life around making sure that such a thing never happened. She’d devoted herself, body and soul, to his protection and well-being, at a cost greater than she could ever have imagined.

And she paid in full – in the terrible toll on her psyche, in her sweat, in her tears, in her blood.

Phineas was someone worlds away from her, in every aspect imaginable. He took spiders outside the bunker to avoid having to injure them, and she many a time had turned her instrument of protection into an instrument of death for any who dared oppose her. Taking lives had never been something she’d foreseen herself doing, but when the time had come, not even that price had been too high, and she’d grit her teeth and swung true, letting the last shard of gray in her soul wither to blackness as her opponent buckled before her strength, never to rise again.

It was cruel, cold, and unthinkable, but it was life. It was her _duty_ , and there was no length she would not go to to fulfill it – to continue to uphold the promise she’d made when only a child, that her brother would never suffer harm, that his mind would forever be spared the darkness of the world.

She would take it all for him, and if the time should come that she should be required of her very life to ensure that, then she would not hesitate or falter in the face of her own demise.

She was no good to a recovering world. Her life was violent and dark, checkered with cruelty and bloodstains meant for another much more innocent than she. Phineas was… different. He was everything she once was, everything she could have become, and then some. She loved him more than life itself, and nothing would ever take him away from her as long as she had breath in her body and blood in her veins to prevent it.

He was all that was left to her in the world, but that was okay. She didn’t need anything or anyone else. No matter what happened, or might happen, as long as he was safe and happy, as long as she could return to him and have him run to greet her at the bunker door, as long as she could sit on the couch and close her eyes, letting him snuggle close and put his head on her chest, as long as she could feel the warmth and weight of his slight figure as she pulled him to her…

… then everything else would always, _always_ be bearable.

* * *

 

For Phineas, to love Candace was a bit like loving one’s guardian angel.

Candace was no guardian angel as shown in storybooks of old. She was dirty and usually stank of fermented sweat and body odor, was often curt and snappish. Her voice naturally rose to harsh volumes, even inside, and her skin was rough and pitted, coated with bristly orange hair all over her body and pockmarked by massive scars and callouses, burnt by the sun, stretched taut over her wiry, bony frame and muscles that were nearly as hard as the concrete floor of the bunker itself.

None of that had ever mattered to Phineas.

He had read some stories of guardian angels old, had taken in the flowery descriptions of flowing hair and white robes, of flaming swords and feathery wings, of appearances so beautiful that mortal being could scarcely look upon them.

Candace had never been anything like that.

She stared absently at walls, her eyes forever obscured, her face disfigured with scars and injury, coated in a layer of dirt and grime and sweat and sometimes blood – and yet, when she would smile at him and flash –  even if for only the briefest of moments –  her crooked yellow teeth, he was was confident that she was more pretty than any fanciful angel of lore could ever have hoped to be.

He didn’t know what those angels protected their charges from, and though he supposed they did a good enough job, he could help but feel that it was... different. With his sister, it most certainly was different, different altogether.

With Candace, there was no doubt, no vagueness, and no confusion. He could sit next to her and lean against her – he could run his hands over her body and feel the rough skin there, the scars and bruises that patterned their ways over it, set in dark relief against it, over the knots in her muscles and the callouses on her skin, and he _knew_. He could see firsthand, marked directly onto her own body, the things and the threats from which she protected him from.

He couldn’t imagine what they’d felt like when they happened. Sometimes he would ask, and sometimes she would answer – but the stories she told were clipped and short, and if he asked too many, she’d shake her head and tell him not to focus on such things.

So he often didn’t – instead leaning against her in silence and tracing his fingers over the patterns etched across her body, each one standing testament to the kind of person she was, and what she absorbed so that _his_ skin could be fair and unblemished – so that _he_ could be whole.

With all that evidence in plain sight every time he looked at her, the real question to him was how could he _not_ love her? Every inch, from to the stringy, unkempt hair that sprouted in dull orange all over her body, to the chip in her front tooth to each individual scar that had carved its path into her – and most of all, to the blue eyes that he knew lurked behind her smoked lenses.

She was who she was because of _him_ – because of _protecting him_. She’d allowed herself to break in ways that he couldn’t even fathom surviving so that he wouldn’t _have_ to fathom them.

The world was a scary place, but with his older sister around, there was never anything to fear, not from man or beast or acts of nature.

And with all _that_ to consider, who _else_ could he love? Someone _other_ than the woman who’d sacrificed so much in order to let him become who he had? He couldn’t imagine such feelings ever taking root in his heart, not really. His love and devotion eternally belonged to the one who deserved it most of all – to his older sister, his protector, his guardian angel.


End file.
